donn@utah-cs.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (07/05/85)
I want to thank all the people who sent mail to me in response to my original posting on the subject. I tried to give personal replies to each message, but in the end the volume was simply overwhelming, so I hope you'll accept this note as a heartfelt 'thank you'. My friend's telephone harrassment has stopped, but his problems are not yet over. Pacific Bell still maintains that he placed all of the calls on his bill and wants him to pay up immediately. He has paid for everything except the last several months of charges for '976-Service' calls. Pacific Bell's '976-Service' lets a company furnish a recording which is played when a number in the 976 'exchange' is dialed; in addition to the usual toll charges on a call to one of these numbers, a separate per-call additional charge is made, part of which goes to the company. This per-call charge varies from $0.50 for calls to dial-a-soap or horoscopes to $2.00 for dial-a-porn. My friend is refusing to pay for some $300 in charges for calls to 976 numbers, involving some hundreds of calls over a period of several months. (The total amount of bogus charges for 976 calls appears to be around $425, counting 976 calls which were paid for before my friend recognized the nature of the problem.) My friend would like to get advice on how to to put together a petition to the PUC, so that he can at least prevent Pacific Bell from taking action until the dispute over phreaking has been settled. Pacific Bell claims that they are prepared to destroy my friend's credit rating (curiously, the same threat was made by the harrassing phone callers), and has said that they will cut off his phone service soon, so my friend wants to move quickly. My friend would also like information on how best to persuade the PUC to examine his case and resolve the issue over the charges completely. (If you think another arena would be more appropriate, we're open to suggestions.) If you have experience in this area, we'd sure like to hear from you. My friend and I feel that the case will be more persuasive if we can document previous cases of phreaking, particularly cases which affected Pacific Bell. If you have any leads on articles or papers which discuss phreaking, we'd sure appreciate it if you could send us pointers to them, and if you have any personal experiences with problems of this kind, we'd be interested in hearing about that too. My friend has seen a copy of the original article I posted, and I've received some feedback on it from him. There are a few minor inaccuracies or omissions in the article which I can correct. My friend says that his son didn't get onto a phreak bboard; the abuse is probably coming from acquaintances of the son at his high school (which is in a high-tech area and has many students whose parents work in the electronics industry). The police were indeed called in to handle the abusive phone calls, and a policeman was actually on the line when a couple of these calls came in. The calls stopped immediately after this, however... My friend believes he understands how his long-distance access code was stolen -- he thinks that someone may have knocked at the front door and asked to use the phone, and this person dug through the papers around the phone and uncovered the access code. (Needless to say, my friend no longer keeps his access code written down in an insecure place...) Not all of the unfamiliar numbers which appeared on my friend's bills were 976 numbers, at least at first. (All or virtually all of the unfamiliar numbers since the time the abusive calls stopped have been these 976 numbers, however.) For example, my friend was charged for 25 calls to the west coast consulate of the USSR over three months, as well as one long distance call to the military attache at the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. (Don't ask me what business the phreaks had with the Russians...) Many of the numbers that were called are apparently unlisted; some of them may actually be numbers internal to Pacific Bell facilities, although my friend can't be sure because Pacific Bell won't discuss them. (Pacific Bell also refused to disclose the identities of the companies that ran the 976 numbers my friend was charged for, until a recent PUC decision forced them to do so.) My friend has found that a number of the abusive calls he received were billed to his own long distance access code. When he investigated some of the unfamiliar numbers on his long distance bill he found some people who had also received abusive calls. (The harrassers used other methods to get at my friend; for example they would call companies and misrepresent themselves as my friend, ordering services which my friend didn't want or need, and on at least one occasion they made a collect obscene phone call by giving the operator the name of someone known to the family...) The total bill for all the calls combined never reached a thousand dollars, but it certainly was several hundred dollars; part of that bill was forgiven by the long distance service (unfortunately Pacific Bell has not been so magnanimous). If I remember any more mistakes my friend found, I'll mention them in the next message... My friend was very glad to see the pile of messages from the net which I sent him, and I hope that I'll have more to give him soon... Many of the messages simply expressed support; a number of them made practical suggestions about how to fight phreaks and communicate with the phone company, and my friend is looking into a number of the avenues that were proposed. A couple responses seemed rather negative -- I was surprised to see that some people felt that my friend deserved the treatment he got, either because he was naive about the potential for telephone abuse and hence was 'asking for it', or because the son had somehow betrayed the phreaks and required punishment for being dishonest. I'm not sympathetic to these attitudes and by the number of positive responses, neither are the bulk of news readers... Thanks again for the help, Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@utah-cs.arpa 40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 decvax!utah-cs!donn